Keep an eye on the bath water

Was this past weekend’s election in Australia which, like it did earlier this year in the United Kingdom, produced a hung parliament with no clear winning party, the final sign that the Westminster model is dying and has reached it sell-by-date? The South African experience suggests that nations should, however, be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

In a report on the Australian election results, after which neither the Labour Party nor the Liberal-National coalition could command a majority, openDemocracy Patrick Dunleavy is quoted from the LSE Politics and Policy blog as observing that:

“For the first time in history, the Australian outcome means that every key Westminster-model country in the world now has a hung Parliament. These are the former British Empire countries that according to decades of political science orthodoxy are supposed to produce strong, single-party government. Following Duverger’s Law their alleged ‘majoritarian’ electoral systems (first-past-the-post and AV) will typically produce reinforced majorities for one of the top two parties.

“But now … four of the five key countries have coalition governments in balanced parliaments where no party has a majority. The one exception is Canada, where the Parliament has been hung since 2004, across three general elections.”

Increasingly there is a movement towards electoral reform in five key Westminster- model countries as they move towards multi-party systems in which hung parliaments are increasingly the norm.

Dunleavy comes to the conclusion that “although Westminster-model countries continue to share a powerful institutional heritage, it seems doubtful that the electoral aspects of the model can ever be the same again.”

In the United Kingdom the momentum towards a multi-party system was boosted with the platform created for smaller – sometimes special-interest – parties by the European Parliament with its proportional voting system.

There is now a referendum on hand in the UK on the possible adoption of an Alternative Vote system to cater for the international movement towards a more complex and multi-party dispensation.

The South African experience pre-1994 with its Westminster, first-past-the-post per constituency voting and winner-takes-all voting system, has illustrated to what extent the results could lead to the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the winning party. The National Party for example in both the elections of 1948 and 1953 won the majority of the seats with a minority of the total votes on a national basis.

Despite the fact that parties to the more extreme right-wing of the (white) voters corps during the late 1970s and 1980s commanded as much as 20% plus of the votes nationally they were largely left voiceless in Parliament. This greatly contributed to their radicalisation at the time.

Experience since 1994 under a purely proportional voting system has, however, also showed that the old constituency-based system had one very big advantage: In every town or district every voter had an own member of parliament that he or she knew by name and who could be approached with problems and/or needs. It also ensured strong local accountability for every MP.

Under the present system voters have no personal go-to-representative and local accountability has become non-existent.

The baby has disappeared with the bath water.